Thursday, April 21, 2016

Well - I never thought I'd be typing this again - but I just saw Lush live in concert.

I've spent a lot of time with this band throughout the years. The band members are roughly my age, and I remember buying their early EPs and thinking "These guys are amazing" and also "I think I can play some of these songs". Early band lineups of mine did include covers of "For Love" from their sophomore album "Spooky".

Also - they were huge fans of Wire. They covered "Outdoor Miner" on one of their EPs, which I thought was a great version. And we both covered versions of Wire's "Mannequin" - although their cover was much more famous than mine.

I remember seeing one of their early Seattle shows at a small nightclub called "...the weathered wall". According to Miki's notes, this was roughly June 1994.

Flash forward to this year when the remaining members got together and decided to try something. The results were a new EP - Blind Spot - and a tour.

They were supposed to play a number of gigs prior to Seattle, but visa issues kept them out of the country. We ended up being the first U.S. show - Miki even mentioned that they had basically just got off the plane.

They were amazing:

I even managed to capture a couple of songs on video: "For Love" and "Monochrome". Here's "For Love":

Monochrome was a complete surprise. The band had done the three song "obligatory encore" and left the stage. The house lights had come up, and they started playing exit music. However - we were having none of that. We cheered and clapped so long that Lush came back on stage and played a true encore. You'll hear Miki mention at the start of the clip that "this really is the last one" - they weren't kidding. Sadly, the Showbox had a hard 11:00 PM curfew, so that was literally the last song they could play. Here's "Monochrome":

As Miki said at the end, "must go - slightly tearing up". Indeed. All in all, an amazing night.